I take a dim view of how I spent my free time as a teenager. Reverse to how many people see it, I think my school time was great for me and my intellectual development, while my spare time often made me a worse thinker.* In particular, I’ll call out my habit of videogames and YA fantasy novels. Here’s a thing I wish I hadn’t learned.
In YA novels, if you’ve ever spent 10 minutes living in the woods, you’re now an A+ expert on all things forestry. It doesn’t matter if you’re up against an adversary who logically would have spent years training for this, don’t worry, if a single person on your team has some plausibly related piece of backstory, you’re going to have an advantage.
Additionally, your primary talent is probably something where you have a god-given advantage over the rest of the world.
So fantasy novels are unrealistic. I noticed this while reading them. I still think I’d rather read books that will leave my system 1 with a more accurate understanding of talents. But what I noticed recently was that I didn’t quite appreciate that these novels (and books) had discontinuities of talent. Many talents are power law distributed, to be sure, but more commonly they are normally distributed.
I’ve noticed myself appreciating that I/my friend/coworker/acquaintance are good at something, and then it taking a while to realize how not-special their talent is, to the detriment of my predictions about the world.
———
Another anti-useful learning: I spent years training my intuitive appreciation for how often a 90% accurate attack will miss on game THAT LIED ABOUT IT’S ACCURACY.
* I think I still am my best self doing productive things and often my spare time is spent unproductively.
YA Novels and Human Talent Distributions
I take a dim view of how I spent my free time as a teenager. Reverse to how many people see it, I think my school time was great for me and my intellectual development, while my spare time often made me a worse thinker.* In particular, I’ll call out my habit of videogames and YA fantasy novels. Here’s a thing I wish I hadn’t learned.
In YA novels, if you’ve ever spent 10 minutes living in the woods, you’re now an A+ expert on all things forestry. It doesn’t matter if you’re up against an adversary who logically would have spent years training for this, don’t worry, if a single person on your team has some plausibly related piece of backstory, you’re going to have an advantage.
Additionally, your primary talent is probably something where you have a god-given advantage over the rest of the world.
So fantasy novels are unrealistic. I noticed this while reading them. I still think I’d rather read books that will leave my system 1 with a more accurate understanding of talents. But what I noticed recently was that I didn’t quite appreciate that these novels (and books) had discontinuities of talent. Many talents are power law distributed, to be sure, but more commonly they are normally distributed.
I’ve noticed myself appreciating that I/my friend/coworker/acquaintance are good at something, and then it taking a while to realize how not-special their talent is, to the detriment of my predictions about the world.
———
Another anti-useful learning: I spent years training my intuitive appreciation for how often a 90% accurate attack will miss on game THAT LIED ABOUT IT’S ACCURACY.
* I think I still am my best self doing productive things and often my spare time is spent unproductively.